A State for all its Citizens?

Two Israeli's address the issue of the state's future as a Jewish and democratic state:

ARAB MINORITY'S VISION IS FOREMOST ABOUT OPPORTUNITY
By Yousef Jabareen
Forward, Opinion
April 13, 2007 Issue

This past December, Israeli Arab academics, legal experts and community leaders came together to release 'The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.' The document, of which I was a co-author, represented the community's views on the legal, political and socioeconomic status that we have held as distinct minority citizens of Israel...

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A STATE OF ALL ITS CITIZENS
Accusations of subversion against a Palestinian MP in Israel are about resistance to democratic change
Neve Gordon
The Guardian, Comment
Friday April 20, 2007

...In the past few months, Palestinian intellectuals and activists, all of whom are Israeli citizens, have drafted four documents about the state's future. The underlying assumption is that, as long as Israel is defined as a Jewish state, its laws will always fall short of basic democratic principles and the right of all its citizens to full equality.

One document, the "democratic constitution", says Arab citizens should be considered a "homeland minority" with national rights. The idea is to transform Israel into a bilingual and multicultural democracy for all its citizens. Citizenship would no longer be granted automatically to any Jew, but to anyone born within Israel's territory or whose parent or spouse was a citizen, and to anyone persecuted for their political beliefs.

Not long after the document's publication, Israel's second-largest newspaper, Ma'ariv, reported a meeting at which the head of the security agency, Yuval Diskin, warned the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that the radicalisation of Israel's Arab citizens constituted a "strategic threat to the state's existence". Diskin said: "The proliferation of the visionary documents ... is particularly worrisome, [since] the documents are united by their conception of Israel as a state for all its citizens and not a Jewish state." He concluded: "The separatist and subversive patterns represented by the elites might engender a new direction and mobilise the masses."

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